Up to six million computers worldwide may have been infected by the Sasser worm first detected last week, including those of some large multinational corporations, Finnish internet security firm F-Secure said on Monday.
“Our estimate is that at least hundreds of thousands of computers have been infected worldwide, and that that number is growing,” said Mikko Hyppoenen, who heads anti-virus research at F-Secure.
“Looking at network traffic, maybe up to 1% of all computers worldwide, some six million, could be infected,” he added.
The Sasser bug has hit several large corporations around the world, forcing them to shut down their services, Hyppoenen said, refusing, however, to name those companies due to client confidentiality.
“There are some large outbreaks in international companies. There is more going on than is reported,” he said, declining to give any further details.
F-Secure’s estimates were, however, lower than other industry experts.
The anti-virus company Panda Software said on Sunday it believed that slightly more than 3% of the world’s computers, about 18-million out of the estimated 600-million operating worldwide, were infected.
“Compared to other viruses which have appeared on weekends when activity is low — doubly so now that May 1 is a holiday in many countries — this one has positioned itself as one of the quickest-spreading and most virulent ones,” said Luis Corrons of PandaLabs, which has offices in Spain and the United States.
According to reports, Australia’s New South Wales trains authority Rail Corp may have been affected by the virus.
Train traffic was disrupted on Sunday when drivers were prevented from talking to rail traffic controllers, stranding 300Â 000 passengers on their platforms.
And Delta Airlines said it experienced technical glitches on May 1, which forced it to cancel a number of flights, which computer experts said may have been caused by the virus.
The Sasser bug was first detected last week and began spreading rapidly at the weekend. Experts had warned that the number of computers affected could skyrocket when businesses resumed work on Monday, as people brought their laptops in to the office after the weekend.
Since laptops are not protected by company firewall systems if used on a server other than the company’s, they run the risk of being infected and in turn infect the company’s network when used in the office.
Unlike a virus, Sasser does not travel through e-mails or attachments. It can spread by itself to any unprotected computer linked to the internet.
It attacks through a flaw in recent versions of Microsoft’s Windows — Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP — and causes the computer to shut down, then rebooting it, repeating the process several times. But it appears to do no lasting damage. — Sapa-AFP
‘Problem seems to be getting worse’